FIGHTING WITH A FANTASY

Many computer games and Adventure Gamebooks have their roots in
the same soil, and recently they have been moving towards each other. SEAN
MASTERSON takes a look at some of the tales behind this publishing success
story and investigates the interface between book and computer game.

GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS

n their time at the keyboard, most computer gamers have spent
some of it trying to escape from the deepest of dungeons or attempting to
defeat the deadliest of dragons. Many of these are also likely to play Role
Playing Games (RPGs for short) which adorn the market nowadays.
These games, typified by such success stories as Dungeons &
Dragons and Traveller involve highly complex group sessions,
organised in the most abstract way. Participants often spend days or even weeks
developing character backgrounds to play, which are formed from a mixture of
the player’s imaginations and mathematical notations (as an expression of
the relevant rules system). An arbitrarily appointed referee designs the
actual plot for the upcoming adventure. When all is ready, the group meets and
a free-form game commences in the form of group discussions and dice rolls
cross-referenced with the rules.

The games themselves can last for months or years if intelligently played
and refereed, and once finished, the same rules and players may start the whole
process again. The objectives are as abstract as the games themselves with
monetary rewards or power and personal fulfilment available to the successful
character. Players participate for the fun of the affair.

In the UK, two names come to mind more than any others: Steve Jackson
and Ian Livingstone (see CRASH 13 February — Here there be
Monsters). Whilst they have yet to achieve massive appeal in the US where
role playing began, they dominate the UK and European gaming world for two main
reasons. Firstly, they had the foresight to see that Dungeons &
Dragons was destined to be a runaway success, and as a consequence of this
flash of inspiration, formed Games Workshop, the most successful specialist
games company this side of the Atlantic. The second reason is that between
them, they invented the Fighting Fantasy phenomenon.

Selling Fighting Fantasy isn’t only a matter of writing
the books and marketing them, it’s also a case of promoting the concept
generally. FIGHTING FANTASY — THE INTRODUCTORY ROLE-PLAYING GAME is
Steve Jackson’s handbook on how to write your own fantasy adventures.

GAMES FOR THE SOLE

ighting Fantasy is, in effect, a solo role playing game in the
form of a paperback book. The first of these was The Warlock of Firetop
Mountain. Now, there are seventeen books in this series alone (though more
of them are being written by guest authors) and there have been a variety of
new, independent series by other authors and publishers.

Many hard core RPGers have laughed at the relative simplicity and
limitations of such game books but they have, if nothing else, been responsible
for a whole new breed of role players, as they serve as a perfect introduction
to youngsters barely in their teens (at one point, the average age for a
role player was about 19). It may be of interest to note that many of the
authors now writing these Adventure Gamebooks, (as they are more
generally known) are ex-Games Workshop employees. This is not unusual as
being an ex-Games Workshop employee myself, I’m fully aware that
being an absolute games nut was one of the qualifications for the job!

In fact, these games are more similar to computer adventure games than true
role playing games, as both are aimed at the single player, and both have
option restrictions (due to the nature of the media) that would not be present
in a conventional RPG. This has led to computer spin-offs of the books. Messrs
Livingstone and Jackson have had a computer version of their first book
released (Warlock of Firetop Mountain, programmed by Crystal) and
The Way of the Tiger series about a ninja warrior, written by Mark
Smith and Jamie Thomson, who is ex-features editor of White
Dwarf magazine, is about to be converted for the popular home micros by
Gremlin Graphics.

The Way of the Tiger series is based around Avenger, a ninja
warrior of unparalleled skills and deadly powers. His adventures all centre on
scenarios calling for him to defend the weak and downtrodden. The Gremlin
Graphics team are working in close co-operation with the two authors, and
Gremlin’s Ian Stewart says the series will offer the best in
gameplay and graphics.

With the type of stories most popular In adventure gamebooks, it isn’t
surprising to see an adventure-based software house like Adventure
International also involving themselves, and as we have reported before in
CRASH, Steve Jackson’s The Swordmaster series is still under
development with AI.

YOU, THE HERO

dventure Gamebooks have now reached massive proportions
and they frequently dominate the children’s best-sellers lists. The
Fighting Fantasy series proved hugely successful from the start, and having
encouraged many other series, it was inevitable that the genre would begin to
move away from its origins in D&D in search of a wider range of storylines
— and a wider audience. From the traditional swords and sorcery approach,
some adventure gamebooks have moved as far as a ‘Mills & Boon’
romance type, employing the same basic techniques as their hack and slay
predecessors! Puffin’s Ice Dancer by Elizabeth Buchan and Tessa
Strickland puts YOU into the whirlwind action of the ice skating champ —
The Olympics are on the way and YOU, an exceptionally talented young
skater, have a chance to compete for your country. But beware! The path to fame
and success is not easy. There are unexpected dangers to face, enemies to
outwit and, above all, a gold medal to win...

Note the use of the word YOU. There has long been two schools of
thought when it comes to involving the reader in a gamebook — should the
hero/ine be nameless, so that the reader, YOU, can play yourself, or is it
better for the author to provide a named hero/ine with which the reader/player
identifies? In the main, the former school of thought seems to be the most
popular, and in this respect adventure gamebooks are unusual because in almost
every other medium you can think of, a named central character (the
‘I’ or ‘HE/SHE’ of a book, film, computer game etc) is
considered essential to enjoyment.

However, one area where gamebooks and computer games tend to be alike is in
dual authorship. Not every computer game is written by a team or a duo, but
most are, and most popular gamebooks are by two authors as well. Although the
individual’s labours may be split in any number of ways, there seems to
be a tendency for one to be the gameplay expert (devising the combat systems
etc) and the other to be the ‘novelist’; similarly with computer
games, where the game design and programming expertise are becoming slightly
separated elements. Dual authorship can often lead to personality clashes of
course, and the role playing and adventure gamebook market has had plenty of
those besides ones peculiar to itself.

Almost every gamebook relies on black and white illustrations to
add to the atmosphere, partly because they are fun to have, but partly because
the atmosphere normally created by words in a novel is generally lacking when
text sections are broken up as much as they are in adventure books.

Some of the illustrations are pretty dreadful, but Granada’s "Golden
Dragon" series have some excellent drawings, like the two shown here, one of
which seems to rely heavily on horror actor Vincent Price’s
features...

The illustrations by Russ Nicholson are from No 4 In the series, THE EYE OF
THE DRAGON written by Dave Morris.

Moving away from the more traditional sword and sorcery
approach, recent Adventure Gamebooks have delved into the classic young
people’s adventure story. THE FEATHERED SERPENT is a Nancy Drew & the
Hardy Boys story in Armada’s "Be a Detective" series. A priceless Mexican
treasure of burnished gold lies at the end of the quest — which clues
should the famous sleuths follow? Only YOU can decide!

This book, more traditionally, follows the adventures of the gang without
you involved in the storyline.

This illustration by Leo Hartas shows how far adventure
gamebook artists will go to create animation in their pictures, emulating the
movement of animated computer graphics by using techniques borrowed from comic
strips. See how the perspective on the sword arm heightens the effect that the
monster is slashing at you from the page. This one is from No 3 in
Granada’s "Golden Dragon" series, THE LORD OF SHADOW KEEP, written by
Oliver Johnson.

Elizabeth Buchan & Tessa Strickland’s ICE DANCER, No
5 under the Puffin Adventure Game Books Imprint. Aimed more at girls than
boys, there’s gold at the end of this one too, but in the form of an
Olympic medal.

From the British co-Granddaddy, Steve Jackson, APPOINTMENT
WITH F.E.A.R. takes the Fighting Fantasy genre away from its sword and sorcery
beginnings into the world of the future.

COMBAT STATUS

he games industry itself, is full of problems. More people get
sued in any given week than the software industry manages in a year. The
English market, though proportionately smaller than its American cousin, is far
more stable. This is due to the large ‘bible bashing’ contingent
which, in the States, has declared RPGs as the work of the Devil! Indeed they
have gone so far as to accuse Gary Gygax (of D&D fame) of being
the Devil’s patsy. They are now taking TV and radio airtime to enforce
their philosophies.

As an example of the scale of the problems these people create, consider the
case of Proctor & Gamble, a massive international pharmaceuticals company.
Their company logo is remarkably similar to TSR’s. It depicts a man in
the Moon, looking at the stars. TSR’s shows a bearded wizard in a half
moon, surrounded by stars. According to the bible-bashers, this is conclusive
evidence that TSR are in league with the Devil. Unfortunately, their Divine
Insight failed to stop them from confusing TSR with Proctor & Gamble. The
result has been that the latter company has had up to 20,000 phone calls of an
abusive or threatening nature — per day. As a result of this, Proctor
& Gamble have dropped the logo that successfully headed their company for
150 years! They are now seeking legal action against ‘those they feel
responsible’ for their troubles.

Companies are also highly protective of their game products and trademark
just about anything that falls within their grasp. For instance, Americans
spell the word ‘traveler’ with only one L.
Consequently, when the Illinois based Game Designers’ Workshop (no
relation to Games Workshop) brought out their best-selling SF game,
Traveller, two L’s were used to distinguish the product and the
name was trade-marked. One of Steve Jackson’s early Fighting Fantasy
books was called Starship Traveller. Now, for the English market, this
is not particularly unusual, as it employs our spelling of the word. This
little detail failed to impress GDW who claimed that it was a breach of
copyright and threatened action against Mr Jackson!

If it wasn’t enough to have games personalities and companies creating
hassles for each other left right and centre, more problems are created by the
obscure nature of the products themselves. Earlier this year, Games Workshop
ordered a product from an American company called Steve Jackson Games
(different Steve Jackson, I’m afraid — now that has led to some
funny incidents). Steve Jackson Games manufactures the highly successful
Car Wars (reminiscent of Games Workshop’s Battlecars
computer game), winner of many of the industry’s top awards. It’s a
game with RPG overtones where the players build and control futuristic
vehicles, armed to the teeth with lasers and missiles and duel against each
other. The supplement to this game, which Games Workshop ordered, was called
The AADA Vehicle Guide. In effect, it is a manual of pre-designed
vehicles for the players to use in their games. Unfortunately, a customs spot
check at Dover resulted in the product being impounded for several months
because they claimed it was a mail order catalogue of terrorist weaponry!

The fun doesn’t stop there. Many of the games employ the use of
unusual dice called polyhedra dice, for the purposes of generating different
probability curves. Because these dice aren’t generally available, they
are often included with the game. However, when it can be avoided, are they
left out and you have to purchase them separately. This may appear awkward but
there is logic behind the move. Books and magazines are exempted from VAT.
Since most RPGs come in form of collections of rules books, if dice are
excluded from the packaging, the products may be marketed as ‘boxed
books’ and therefore carry no VAT. Games packaged with dice must be sold
as ‘games’ and do carry VAT and are, therefore, disproportionately
more expensive. This has led to countless problems with customs and tax
officials and on at least one occasion, a company has had to withdraw every
copy of the game from the shelves and repack it with dice.

FRESH BLOOD AND BUGS

he games industry is still a great one however. It grows and
becomes more commercial every day but it’s an industry of imaginations
with room for fortunes to be made if you have a good idea and take the right
route.

Chaosium are an American company who produce games of consistently
amazing quality and ingenuity. One of their greatest success stories is the
game Call of Cthulu based on the horror mythos invented by novelist HP
Lovecraft. Apart from being a beautifully and carefully created game, true to
the atmosphere the late author adored, it has some very interesting features.
Most games award some kind of ‘experience points’ for well played
characters. These allow a character to become more skilled within his chosen
class or profession as the campaign progresses. This means that a Fighter gains
better chances of hitting creatures with a sword for instance. A magician finds
that his spells succeed more often and that he has access to more powerful
magic. Such a system, Chaosium decided, wasn’t really in the spirit of a
horror story. In fact, in most Lovecraft stories, the main character usually
dies either because the horrors that he faces are so powerful, or he goes
insane because they are so obscene. Consequently, in the game, each character
has a number of sanity points which diminish as they uncover more of the
erudite lore! Successful play requires the players to skirt around the edge of
the problems they face whilst still trying to learn as much as possible and
warn the rest of mankind. Major confrontations result in almost certain instant
death for the characters.

Suspense becomes the name of the game and the characters know that their
situation is desperate and their cause almost lost, right from the moment that
they begin play. In a morbid way, it can be amusing to see total beginners
getting wiped out after spending their first hour arming their characters to
the teeth.

After all these tales of horror and woe, it’s reassuring to know that
the industry has a sense of humour as well. There was once a game called
Bunnies & Burrows — try and imagine what that was like to
play. The funniest aspects of gaming, however, derive from the almighty
cock-ups pervading almost every rules system ever devised, which resemble the
ubiquitous ‘bugs’ to be found in almost any computer game
program.

One of the prolific (American) Steve Jackson’s games magazines,
The Space Gamer, has a column called Murphy’s Rules to
bring some of these details to the hobbyists’ attention. Some of the
items lucky enough to grace its pages are hilarious. In Blade’s
Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes it is possible for an average car to
be driven headlong into a tank (demolishing it in the process) and remain
driveable, 50% of the time. In GDW’s Azhanti High Lightening (a
game set aboard an enormous space ship), it is possible to have an infinite
number of dead bodies covering an area of floor 1.5m x 1.5m and still have a
fully laden character pass through without any problem whatsoever!

But these little ‘bugs’ only reflect relatively tiny errors in
what are really incredibly complex rules systems and as the games are
themselves designed to be altered to suit individual tastes, they cause no
problem. Gamers take a far more participative approach to their games than
computer gamers can ever hope to.

The hobby does not appear to be the fad which many hard-core wargamers once
accused it of being. It offers more scope to the imaginative, than any group
pastime yet devised. The hobby was born out of a love for things of a complex
nature such as Tolkien’s books, Wargaming, and the era of progressive
rock. It may sound like a strange mixture of inspirations but it’s true.
There are a myriad of philosophies as to what makes a good game, or indeed what
makes a good player but this is a healthy sign for the hobby and the more these
arguments take place, the more their outcomes will add to adventure gamebooks.
One day the areas of computer gaming and Role Playing are destined to overlap
and that should provide us all with games more imaginative and fulfilling than
any seen to date.

The ever increasing popularity of Fighting Fantasy and Role Playing looks
set to bring more ideas, egos and costly arguments into the field of battle. I,
for one, will be there to see it!